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Botnets As "eWMDs"
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Dec 09, 2008 07:21 PM
from the trying-to-wake-sleeping-policymakers dept.
from the trying-to-wake-sleeping-policymakers dept.
John Kelly writes "The current issue of Policy Review has a paper by an American computer scientist and the recent Permanent Undersecretary of Defense for Estonia. Drawing on the Estonian cyber attacks a year and a half ago, as well as other recent examples, they argue that botnets are the major problem. They propose that botnets should be designated as 'eWMDs' — electronic weapons of mass destruction. The paper also proposes a list of reforms that would help to limit the scale and impact of future botnet attacks, beginning with defining and outlawing spam, internationally." Many of the proposed solutions are common-sensical and won't be news to this audience, but it is interesting to see the botnet threat painted in such stark terms for readers of the Hoover Institution's Policy Review. For a more comprehensive overview of cyber-security threats, listen to NPR's interview with security experts on the occasion of the release of a new report, "Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency," which recommends creating a cyber-security czar reporting to the President.
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What masses, specifically, have botnets destroyed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Subject says it all.
This is... ridiculous.
Re:What masses, specifically, have botnets destroy (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Fear (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bingo.
Sounds like an attempt to put all the new, nifty "Terrorism Mitigation" laws into use for something they were never intended to be used for.
Well, maybe I am wrong about the intent thing....
Re:Fear (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
"And the concept of hundreds of thousands of zombie computers attacking an institution without the proper defenses could be devastating, especially if that institution is critical to the public health/safety."
Which is why C4I and other important systems should simply never be connected to the internet, and anyone who compromises them by doing so punched in the throat for being stupid.
Re:What masses, specifically, have botnets destroy (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, maybe not a city, but think about what would happen if they took WoW offline for more than an hour. Oh the horror!
Parent
Re:What masses, specifically, have botnets destroy (Score:5, Insightful)
What worries me is I was reading an article today calling on President Obama to create a new office to "protect cyberspace" and I noticed this little nugget from the report recommending Obama act "It proposed online "data warrants," for example, rather than traditional search warrants, which it said "may be increasingly impracticable in the online environment." Now I don't know about you, but after all that Fisa crap i trust their little "data warrants" about as far as I can throw a Cray.
If you would like to read the article it is here [myway.com] but after the last pile of bull we were fed about WMDs the second I hear anything to do with them I start looking for the shovel. And let us be honest here: how many data breaches have we seen in the last few years of both government and private networks that were due to plain old stupidity? Maybe they should do a top to bottom audit of their networks to ensure that best security practices are being used and THEN they can start talking about eWMDs. But until then I will automatically think "power grab" when crap like this hits the news.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They destroyed my inbox! It's now a mass of about 2GB and it's either all junk mail or I have won about a thousand lifetime supplies of male enhancement pills and a nice gentleman with poor english skills is very persistent in expressing his wishes to "undergo a business transaction" involving millions of dollars!
Now, I can't take the chance that it's ALL junk, so I am saving it just to be sure.
Re:What masses, specifically, have botnets destroy (Score:4, Funny)
That would make botnets weapons of mass accumulation, not mass destruction. The quality might not be up to par but you can not complain about the quantity...
Parent
Re:What masses, specifically, have botnets destroy (Score:5, Insightful)
If we think of mass-energy conversion in nuke plants, I would argue that some mass was destroyed (er, converted) to generate a portion of the electricity consumed in botnet attacks. Touche.
More generally, reread the article. They are trying to address a real, asymmetric threat. Some jack-off (or group of jack-offs) can cause measurable harm (counted in your favorite currency if nothing else) via DDoS attacks. That is a demonstrated fact. Estonia argues that their financial sector was largely off-line for three weeks due to (purportedly) coordinated DDoS attacks. If their assertion is correct (a point about which I am neutral), then that DDoS attack was as effective (arguably more effective) on the Estonian financial industry as the 9/11 attacks were on the U.S banking system. Think back to how crazy people were that Wall St. was essentially off-line.
In any case, it is hardly unreasonable to argue that DDoS attacks pose an effective asymmetric threat to certain industries. On the other hand, I am less than convinced that there are Evil Hackers out there capable of and planning to shut down water systems and power distribution. However, should it be possible and occur, think about how short a time it took for New Orleans civil society to disintegrate.
Parent
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New Orleans civil society didn't disintegrate because they couldn't conduct financial transactions, and the power was out. Also, I would bet my family jewels that there are indeed evil hackers out there planning to do evil things. Billions of doll
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Please read my post. I don't suggest that New Orleans civil society came apart due to a financial mess. Rather, people resorted to looting grocery stores for food and water when the tap stopped working and the refrigerator could no longer keep food from spoiling. Of course, there were other contributing factors (like the lack of law enforcement) but desperate people will do what it takes to survive. If the hypothetical Evil Hackers manage to cut water and/or power to a large, urban population, they will
Re:What masses, specifically, have botnets destroy (Score:4, Insightful)
Good Lord, "people looting grocery stores for food and water" is more just efficient use of national resources than anything else. More law enforcement wouldn't have helped: it would have compounded the problem. What would have helped is rapid national disaster response. So, some shops lost a few bottles of water and diapers - that's what insurance is for.
I've walked 1/2 the length of Manhattan twice: once on 9/11 and once for the big blackout. Both times I was offered a bunch of free stuff (water, food, tissues for improvised masks, and even beer as the cooling failed.) Just small businesses and their employees behaving decently.
If someone wants to lock down their basic supplies super-store in the midst of a week-long emergency, I'll be there with a saws-all and spend my day handing out bottled water.
Parent
Re:What masses, specifically, have botnets destroy (Score:4, Insightful)
Basic adult minimums: Breath once a minute, drink once a day, eat once a week.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The goal of more expensive, more powerful government (e.g. a more lucrative business to control for those at the top of the power pyramid) is best achieved through marketing. You shoot high, even claiming the ridiculous as we see here, and then you "back down" into a slightly less outrageous expansion of government, but a significant expansion of the business nonetheless.
Ironically, these crooks are taking a page straight out of the US government's book.
Re:What masses, specifically, have botnets destroy (Score:3, Insightful)
0x73db07
language abuse (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Cl1ck H3rE for 5ive 5ree BOTTLES OF P0is0n gas!
Even though no one dies from them. (Score:4, Insightful)
And anything destroyed by them SHOULD be able to be restored from backup.
Re:Even though no one dies from them. (Score:4, Interesting)
What if a hospital's infrastructure was taken down by a botnet immediately after a natural disaster?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, an attack consisting of several simultaneous bombs in several areas of a city, combined with a systematic botnet attack of the major hospitals of the same city sounds quite evil...
Re:Even though no one dies from them. (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, an attack consisting of several simultaneous bombs in several areas of a city, combined with a systematic botnet attack of the major hospitals of the same city sounds quite evil...
..all of those doctors would be unable to properly bill for their services. Oh, the humanity!
Parent
Re:Even though no one dies from them. (Score:5, Insightful)
The stuff that would be more likely to be problematic are some of the emerging remote medicine toys. If the MRI is here but the radiologist is over at Bangalore Radiology Inc, then you aren't going to be getting any results back during a DDOS.
Parent
A just a hospital? (Score:3, Insightful)
How is taking down a single hospital the work of a Weapon of Mass Destruction?
Taking down a single hospital is nothing that you can't do with a simple truck bomb or even a smaller bomb on the backup generator's fuel supply. People need to remember that not EVERYTHING a terrorist can use to screw someone over is a WMD. Otherwise, most major cities have a WMD depot more commonly called an "airport."
The WMD thing is just buzzword use to try to trigger a hysterical over-response. I mean, when has a botnet do
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Sneaky (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet this is a way to sneak in some more "general purpose" legislation on the net. There is going to be a strong push for that coming from the EU in the next months unfortunately.
I can see it now. Newlines in the papers as Iran is found harboring WMDs along with Syria and Pakistan. Equating NBC weapons with botnets is retarded on an incredible amount of levels.
wmd comparison (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps we should compare some WMD's
An atomic bomb detonated over a dense population center: millions die
An eWMD shuts down water supply: people have to resort to bottled water and, in a worst case scenario, boil rain water; for a few weeks
Perhaps eWMD is a better name for an EMP because that actually DESTROYS something that can not be brought back from the dead using backups
Re: (Score:2)
Could a botnet shut down a water supply?
Not if the people managing the water supply have done their homework. How are you going to DDoS a water treatment plant?
I mean, I know we use the metaphor "clogging the pipes", but it's just a metaphor...
Re: (Score:2)
How about taking over the systems that regulate the generators at a power plant? One could blow out the entire plant and every piece of electrical gear downstream.
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you. Do you have other excellent creative conceptual contributions? Because as we know, box cutters are WMDs - when used with the right brilliant scheme. There must be ten thousand glorious ways to harness ten million zombie computers in unison for nefariousness.
If only the botnets had been employed against Wall Street before Wall Street's computer-enabled credit swaps crippled the economy of the West! Surely the West will rise again. But that it had never fallen. If only the botnet lords had saved us
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It does a disservice to lump together the weapons that have cruelly and inhumanely killed millions of people to something like a botnet which has no physically destructive potential.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no reason to have that kind of equipment connected to a public network. Period.
People say that all the time, but it's simply not true. Coordinating a variety of utilities and their major consumers makes sense. Having the wind farm aware of the local weather predictions, the hydro plant aware of the seasonal rainfall expectations, and the nearby aluminum refinery aware of both of their likely outputs has real value. Your options are then to either build some alternate network and then move data on and off it in some kludgey fashion that isn't 100% secure (there's no rule that says y
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps we should stop calling them "Weapons of Mass Destruction".
Weapons of Mass Effect is a broader term that encompasses bio/chem warfare, EMPS, dirty (radioactive) bombs, large conventional explosives, planes flying into buildings, etc.
And WME would also include things like botnets and malicious worms.
An eWMD shuts down water supply: people have to resort to bottled water and, in a worst case scenario, boil rain water; for a few weeks
It would literally be impossible to truck in enough potable water to sustain even a relatively small population center. In a city of millions, the only solution would be mass relocations. Even if the popul
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
An eWMD breaches security and launches actual WMD: Priceless.
eWMDs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Creative use of language for propaganda (Score:5, Insightful)
This has been happening since the ancient times and we haven't grown out of it. The athenian hegemony was named the athenian alliance, the enslavement of foreign countries by the Romans was called Pax Romana, and even now, he american goverment classifies botnets as eWMD's, every country in the world dubs their Ministry of Military as Ministry of Defence, and War will always be Peace in the Ministry of Love.
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Can we get back to the old definition of WMDs (Score:2, Interesting)
WMDs used to refer to nukes. Nuclear weapons destroy mass. That's why it's weapons of mass destruction and not weapons of massive destruction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_mass_destruction#Evolution_of_its_use
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I've had a quick read of that link, and I can't find anything that suggests mass was ever meant as mass in the physical sense, rather than just a shortened version of massive. Perhaps I missed something?
i'll take some consulting with your fear mongering (Score:2)
Anyone remember that (joke ...oh god i hope it is an onion style joke) article about "HACKERS CAN REMOTELY CAUSE YOUR COMPUTER TO EXPLODE AND INJURE OR EVEN KILL YOU OR YOUR FAMILY" ? (non graphical/slightly less sensational copy here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/04/hackers_can_make_your_pc/ [theregister.co.uk] )
This so called paper by the so called scientist (nice cover for a security consultant i am guessing) reminds me of that article.
Fear mongering with intent to profit.
Re:i'll take some consulting with your fear monger (Score:2)
How could we have missed the similarities.... (Score:2)
It's all so clear to me now, because subverting somebody's computer and causing them inconvenience or financial damage is almost uncannily similar to heating their component molecules to thousands of degrees Kelvin and scattering them over a several mile radius. The threat from having a few computers go wrong is on almost exactly the same scale as the threat from thousands of multi-megaton nuclear warheads raining death on our cities from orbit. Thank you so much for clearing that up for us Mr. John J. Kell
The only spam solution: Nuke from orbit (Score:2)
What's that tag? (Score:2, Funny)
Am I the only one that had to read the "itsanebomb" tag multiple times before properly comprehending?
a) it sane bomb?
b) it's ane bomb?
c) it's a nebomb?
d) Oooohhhh... it's an e-bomb!
Since this is totally bombastic and ridiculous... (Score:2)
clearly somebody is going to make money from all of this hype. Let's follow the money trail...
exactly right, it's about the money (Score:2)
Don't have any special expertise? No matter: you ask for grants so you can hire the people with the real expertise, so you can focus on the schmoozing. Unfortunately these guys are a little lat
If I hear "czar" one more time... (Score:5, Funny)
Back to the *inter* net (Score:2)
A lot of the power of botnets would be gone if critical networks actually had their own network instead of depending on the global internet. It is very popular to do the "VPN" thing and get a private network for near zero startup cost. But if the VPN is mission critical, then you should actually have your own wires or spectrum. Then if a botnet attacks, you just shut off the global internet at the firewall, and the mission critical stuff keeps going.
Microsoft desktop == Abetting Terrorists? (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft's most widely deployed platform and applications have not been secured.
The XP platform has still has 32 unpatched vulnerabilities [secunia.com],
The latest version of Internet Explorer still has 9 unpatched vulnerabilities,
and Outlook 2003 ( the most widely deployed business version of Outlook ) still has one outstanding unpatched vulnerability [secunia.com] ( known since 2004-07-12 ).
Microsoft Office 2003, still the most widely deployed version of Office, has four outstanding vulnerabilities [secunia.com] which put the desktop at high risk of being infected.
Even Microsoft's flagship product Vista has Six unpatched vulnerabilities. [secunia.com]
These are all unpatched widely known vulnerabilities, and are only the ones in Microsoft's own product. Consider all the third party vulnerabilities, in downloadable codecs for example, that the design of Microsoft's platforms makes it so easy for crackers to exploit.
In comparison, all of the major Linux based distros have an excellent record of closing known vulnerabilities within days if not hours, before the holes get a chance to be exploited. Also SELinux is becoming more widely deployed to secure applications against such threats. [livejournal.com].At least with Linux there are existing concrete mechanisms in place ( Vulnerability and threat mitigation features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora [awe.com] ), and currently deployable ( Writing policy for confined SELinux users [redhatmagazine.com] ) to provide a locked down secured environment for Linux desktop users inside an organization.
Also from a more abstract point of view, read Increased security through open source [arxiv.org].
If your using the Microsoft platform, then your abetting the people deploying botnets.